Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (2 page)

s

EMPIRE

Celenderis

R.

SYRIA

CYPRUS

Caesarea

Philippi

SYRIA

MEDITERRANEAN

SEA

SEA OF

Gishala

GALILEE

Caesarea ✰

Jerusalem

Ptolemais

Jefat

Ascalon

Gamala

Nile Delta

Tiberius

Mt. Carmel

✰

Masada

Tarachaea

Pelusium

Alexandria

Caesarea

Area of Inset

✰

N

Scythopolis Jo

Babylon Fossatum

rdan

JUDEA
R.

Nile R.

Joppa Beth-Horon

RED

Battle site

Lod

SEA

JerichoCypros

Mountain

Emmaus

DEAD SEA

Qumran

✰

Jerusalem

Provincial capital

Ascalon

Legion base

IDUMAEA

Machaerus

Legion detachment

Hebron

Roman siege

Masada

NABATAEA

The Middle East,

First Century A.D.

Palestine 66–71 A.D.

©2001 by D. L. McElhannon

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This book would not have been possible without the immense help provided over many years by countless staff at libraries, museums, and historic sites throughout the world. To them all, my heartfelt thanks. Neither they nor I knew at the time what my labor of love would develop into. My thanks, too, to those who read my research material as it blossomed into manuscript form and made invaluable suggestions.

Most particularly, I wish to record my appreciation for the role played by three people in bringing this work to fruition. First, I want to thank Stephen S. Power, senior editor at John Wiley & Sons, for his enthusiasm, encouragement, vision, and guidance.

Then there is Richard Curtis, my wonderful New York literary agent, who over a period of several years supported my aspirations, provided direction, and finally married me with an excellent publishing house. It was Richard who suggested I break down one massive tome on all the legions into histories of individual legions. Without him, there would have been no
Caesar’s Legion.
In this increasingly impersonal new-fashioned electronic age, I can certify without reservation that in a brownstone on the Upper East Side there sits a man who embodies all the old-fashioned qualities that a writer dreams of finding in a literary agent. For a man who embraces technology and is at the forefront of the electronic publishing revolution, you really are a gentleman of the old school, Richard.

And then there is Louise, my wife of almost twenty years. What a roller-coaster ride she has taken with me all these years, never with a word of complaint, always with words of encouragement. How can I describe the role she has played in making this book, in making this writer? Roman historian Tacitus put it best, I think, in his
Agricola.
He was describing the relationship between his mother-in-law, Domitia, and Agricola, his father-in-law, but his words equally express the way I feel about the relationship my beloved wife and I have shared these past two decades: “They lived in rare accord, maintained by mutual affection and unselfishness; in such a partnership, however, a good wife deserves more than half the praise, just as a bad one deserves more than half the blame.”

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A U T H O R ’ S N O T E

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Never before has a comprehensive history of an individual Roman legion been written. This book comes out of thirty years’ research on the Roman military, in the process of which it was possible to identify the fifty Augustan and post-Augustan legions raised between 84 b.c. and a.d. 231 and to compile detailed histories of most of them.

The works of numerous classical writers who documented the wars, campaigns, battles, skirmishes, and most importantly the men of the legions of Rome have come down to us. Authors such as Julius Caesar, Appian, Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, Polybius, Cassius Dio, Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Seneca, Livy, Arrian. Without their labors this book would not have been possible.

Enough material exists, from sources classical and modern—detailed in the appendices of this work—to write whole books on the 14th Gemina Martia Victrix, the legion that beat Boadicea (or Boudicca, as she was actually called); on the 3rd Augusta, the legion that saved the life of St.

Paul the Apostle; on the 6th Victrix, the legion that kidnapped Cleopatra and gave rise to Julius Caesar’s most famous message, “I came, I saw, I conquered”; and on the 12th Fulminata, the legion that gained its fame and its name in Marcus Aurelius’s battles against the Germans so colorfully depicted in the movie
Gladiator.
To mention just a few.

But unquestionably the most renowned legion in its day was the 10th—

Legio X.
In fact, it was described as “world famous” when it arrived to join the Judean offensive of a.d. 67. Personally raised by Julius Caesar, the 10th Legion is on record as taking the leading role in all his battles, from a bloody initiation in Spain to the conquest of Gaul, the invasion of Britain, and the battles of the civil war against Pompey the Great that eventually made Caesar Dictator of Rome. The 10th Legion marched for Mark Antony and for Augustus. It whipped the Parthians under Corbulo, it squashed the Jewish Revolt for Vespasian, and it took the Temple at Jerusalem for Titus. It conquered Masada.

During the research for this work, light was shed on a number of issues relating to the legions, such as the uniqueness of legion commands in
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Egypt and Judea. But the most enlightening aspect of all was the reenlistment factor. The legions of Rome were recruited
en masse,
and the survivors discharged
en masse
at the end of their enlistment—originally after sixteen years, later, after twenty. Replacements were not supplied in the interim. The reenlistment factor explains why particular units were crushed in this battle or that—in some they were made up of raw recruits; in others, they were comprised of men of thirty-nine and fifty-nine about to go into retirement. A later appendix elaborates on the reenlistment factor.

Now to the matter of dates and names. For the sake of continuity, the Roman calendar—which varied by up to two months from our own—is used throughout this work. Place names are generally first referred to in their original form and thereafter by modern name, where known, to permit readers to readily identify locations involved. Personal names familiar to modern readers have been used instead of those technically correct—

Antony instead of Antonius, Julius Caesar for Gaius Caesar, Octavian for Caesar, Pilate for Pilatus, Vespasian instead of Vespasianus, etc.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became fashionable for some authors to refer to legions as regiments, cohorts as battalions, maniples as companies, centurions as captains, tribunes as colonels, and legates as generals. In this work, Roman military terms such as legion, cohort, maniple, and centurion have been retained, as it’s felt they will be familiar to most readers and better convey the flavor of the time.

However, because of a lack of popular familiarity with the term

“legate,” “general” and/or “brigadier general” are used here. “Colonel” and

“tribune” are both used, to give a sense of relative status. Likewise, so that readers can relate to their ranks in comparison to today’s military, when referred to in the military sense “praetors” are given as “major generals”

and “consuls” as “lieutenant generals.” In this way, reference to a lieutenant general, for example, will immediately tell the reader that the figure concerned has been a consul.

I am aware that this approach to ranks is akin to having a foot in two camps and may not please purists, but my aim has been to make this book broadly accessible.

This is the story of the men of the 10th Legion. Men who made Rome great—one or two extraordinary men, and many more ordinary men who often did extraordinary things. In many ways they were not unlike us. But one wonders if we today could even begin to do what they did, to endure what they endured, to achieve what they achieved.

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STARING DEFEAT

IN THE FACE

t was a great day to die. And before the sun had set, thirty-four thousand men would lose their lives in this valley. The men of
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the 10th Legion would have had no illusions. They knew that some of them would probably perish in the battle that lay ahead. Yet, to Romans, nothing was more glorious than a noble death. And if the men of this legion had to die, there was probably not a better place nor a finer day for it, on home soil, beneath a perfect blue sky.

There was not a breath of wind as the legionaries of the 10th stood in their ranks, looking across the river valley toward the Pompeian army. It was lined up five miles away on the slope below Munda, a Spanish hill town near modern Osuna in Andalusia, southeast of Córdoba. The sun was rising in a clear sky on the mild morning of March 17, 45 b.c. After sixteen years of battles in Spain, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Albania, Greece, and North Africa, and having invaded Britain twice, Julius Caesar’s 10th Legion had come full circle, back to its home territory, to fight the battle that would terminate either Rome’s bloodiest civil war or Caesar’s career, and possibly his life.

There were fewer than two thousand soldiers in the 10th now, a far cry from the six thousand men Caesar had personally recruited into the legion back in 61 b.c. Two-thirds of the legion’s strength had fallen over the years. Aged between thirty-three and thirty-six, these surviving legionaries of the famous 10th were due for their discharge this very month. One more battle, Caesar had promised the tough Spaniards of the 10th, and then he would gladly send them home, weighed down by bonus pay and heading for land he would give them as a gift.

The 10th, recognized by friend and foe alike as Caesar’s best legion, occupied the key right wing of his silent, stationary army, as it had in
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many a past battle. The 5th Legion, another Spanish unit, had formed up in its allocated position on the left. In between stood the men of the 3rd, 6th, 7th, 21st, and 30th Legions. Like the 10th, they were all under strength—the 6th Legion could field only several hundred men. About thirty thousand legionaries and auxiliaries in total, in eighty cohorts, or battalions. Split between the two flanks were eight thousand cavalry, the largest mounted force Caesar had ever put into the field, the horses restless as they sensed fear and apprehension on the early morning air.

In the midst of the 10th Legion’s formation, on horseback and surrounded by his staff, helmeted, and clad in armor, fifty-four-year-old Julius Caesar wore his
paludamentum,
the eye-catching scarlet cloak of a Roman general. While his troops waited, he spoke briefly with his cavalry commander, General Nonius Asprenas, finalizing tactics. Then Asprenas galloped away to take up his position—almost certainly joining his cavalry on the right wing, while his deputy, Colonel Arguetius, commanded the mounted troops on the left.

Caesar gave an order. An orderly mounted close by and who held his red ensign inclined the general’s flag toward the front. An unarmed trumpeter sounded “Advance at the March.” Throughout the army, the trumpets of individual units repeated the call. The eagles of the legions and the standards of the smaller units all inclined forward. As one, the men of Caesar’s army moved off, in perfect step, advancing to the attack at the march, in three lines of ten thousand men each.

Caesar had hoped to lure his opponents down onto the flat. But ahead, the men of the opposing army didn’t budge, didn’t advance to meet his troops. Instead, they stood stonily in their lines on the hillside, and waited for Caesar’s army to come to them.

The general commanding the opposition army was Gnaeus Pompey.

Eldest son of a famous general, Pompey the Great, and grandson of another, he was only in his late twenties and had no military reputation to speak of. He had captained a successful naval strike for his father on the Adriatic a few years back, followed by an unsuccessful land operation in Libya shortly after. More recently he’d led his forces in a gradual, fighting withdrawal through southwestern Spain ahead of Caesar’s advance. That was the sum total of his experience of command. But he was Pompey’s heir, and here in Spain, where his late father was revered, that counted for a lot. Besides, as his deputy commanders he had two of Pompey’s best generals. What was more, one of them had been Caesar’s second-in-command for nine years and knew how Caesar thought and fought.

While his younger brother Sextus held the regional capital of Córdoba, Gnaeus had assembled and equipped a large field army of between S TA R I N G D E F E AT I N T H E F A C E

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fifty thousand and eighty thousand men. But few of his units were of quality. Nine of his thirteen legions were brand-new, made up of raw, inexperienced teenagers drafted from throughout western Spain and Portugal.